Christianity Today,

By Rob Moll Jan. 31, 05

Last weekend was the first time in their 6,700 year history that Iraq's Assyrian community was able to participate in a free, democratic election. But Ron Michael, who cast his vote Sunday, says it was insignificant. "It's not going to matter," he said before going to The Assyrian National Council of Illinois Community Center in Skokie, a suburb north of Chicago where the Out of Country Voting Program (OCV) placed one of Chicago's two polling centers.

Though the community center was packed Sunday, with tight security and a full parking lot, Assyrians-who make up 80 percent of Iraq's expatriate community in the United States- were furious, saying they have been purposefully excluded from the election. Without representation, say Assyrians, they won't be able to fight for their rights when the legislative assembly draws up Iraq's constitution. And since they say they are all Christians, Assyrians worry they will continue to suffer persecution, and will continue to leave Iraq, where 50,000 have already fled since U.S. troops invaded.

US disenfranchisement

After two days of voting, only 3,685 people total had voted in Chicago, home to the second largest Assyrian community in the United States, with more than 100,000 Assyrians from Iraq and neighboring countries. Only slightly more than 26,000 Iraqis registered to vote, though Michael believes there are 200,000 Assyrians in the U.S.
The OCV's definition of an eligible voter is broader than the State Department's definition of an Iraqi, says Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House. Someone like Michael is off the radar, she says, because he was born in Lebanon. The OCV allows second-generation expatriates to vote. So Michael, whose father is an Iraqi, is eligible to vote. The State Department classifies him as ChaldoAssyrian.

But Michael is also off the OCV's radar because he is Assyrian. Shea says the OCV asked the U.S. State Department where to put the voting centers. The State Department looked at Census data to find where Iraqi-Americans lived. Because the Census only records ChaldoAssyrians as an ethnic group and doesn't identify their country, their locations didn't factor in placing five U.S. polling centers, which instead focused on centers of Iraqi Kurds and Arab populations.
Assyrians also say the OCV didn't listen when they complained that the only polling place west of the Mississippi River, near Los Angeles, in Irvine , was far from the more than 50,000 Assyrians eligible to vote in San Diego and northern California. Yet, Michael and other Assyrians complain, a community of 3,000 Kurds in Nashville, Tennessee, received their own voting center.

"OCV has done a woefully inadequate job," says Michael. "We have a hundred-thousand Assyrians in California and the polling station is in L.A., where most of the Assyrians happen to be Iranian, not Iraqi. They intentionally avoided San Diego, where we have 35,000 to 40,000 of our people, and perhaps a similar number in the Central Valley."

Shea agrees that when the OCV was notified of the problems, they did nothing. "They were showing flexibility and innovativeness when it became clear that it was a disaster," Shea says. Yet, she says, they ignored the pleas for more polling places. "What I think angers the ChaldoAssyrians is that all the public petitions and appeals by senators and congressmen and bishops, the direct phone calls, they just brushed off, they didn't care. It was bungled from the beginning, and it was left in the hands of indifferent bureaucrats."

Jacklin Bejan, a spokesperson for the ChaldoAssyrian American Advocacy Council, of which Ron Michael is also a member, sees bitter irony. "How is it that we're going in Iraq to install a democratic government, yet in this very country, the symbol of democracy, we as Americans are not afforded the opportunity to participate in the process?" she says "Is this really why our soldiers are dying?"

To the Assyrians gathered in the hallway at the community center, it is clear they have been the object of a campaign to disenfranchise the largest Christian population in Iraq. "You could not have designed a better placement of ballot boxes to ensure the disenfranchisement of Assyrian voters," Michael says.
"We were very hopeful that the expatriate vote, especially in the United States, would contribute to securing at least three or four assembly seats for our people in Iraq," Bejan says. "We wanted to fight so that Iraq will not turn into another Islamic republic like Iran. We needed those seats to fight for the right of the indigenous people of Iraq, the ChaldoAssyrians. Our people depended so much on the votes of the expatriates, and unfortunately, it has been quite disappointing."
Under Kurdish control

At the community center, word was spreading that six ballot boxes in three Christian Assyrian areas in Iraq never arrived. Not only were Iraqi-Assyrians the object of terrorism before the vote, their polling places never opened. By Monday morning, Michael said, the ballot boxes had arrived, but there were no poll workers.
Some Assyrians were visibly angry. "There has been a campaign of terror to lower the turnout," says John Michael, Ron's brother. "The Kurdish Democratic Party prevented the ballot boxes from arriving in six towns under the military control of the U.S., which is presiding over the disenfranchisement of the indigenous Christian people."

Assyrians make up at least 3 percent of Iraqis, though other estimates are higher because Saddam Hussein refused to count them in the census. Michael believes they could make up as much as 6 to 10 percent of the Iraqi vote. The Assyrians trace their Christian heritage back to the church in Antioch, the first group to be called Christians, and they trace their presence in what is now the north of Iraq back to the birth of civilization. Now, they fear, their long history is at an end. "This [vote] is about nothing other than the survival of the last area of predominately Christian people in the world," says John.

Christians in Iraq are suffering disproportionately from terrorist activity, says Bejan. "Our women are subjected to continued threats, our children are kidnapped, our businesses are bombed, our churches are threatened, and our archbishops are kidnapped. Our fear is that we will not be able to fully participate in this first democratic election." International Christian Concern says that Christian women have had acid thrown in the face for not wearing a veil.

The Kurds are systematically displacing the Iraqi Christians, says Larry Allen, spokesperson for ICC. "The Kurds have been making a move for the Nineveh plain area and trying to expand Kurdistan out to the west." The Kurdistan Democratic Party is linked to a paramilitary group that has confiscated homes. "Farmland has been confiscated. In addition, the $20 billion designated for reconstruction in Iraq, the Assyrians have seen none of it. The Kurdish authority is not distributing it," Allen says.

"The Kurds are literally ethnically cleansing us out of the region," says Ron Michael. "They are doing to us what the Sudanese government was doing to the Christians in the south of the Sudan. The Kurds are engaged in a push for autonomy and independence. They feel that they can only achieve their national aspirations by ethnic cleansing, either by political maneuvering or through violence, until every shred of Assyrianism in northern Iraq is gone."

Hope for democracy and survival

The ChaldoAssyrians are "pro-West, pro-democracy, and pro-human rights," Shea says. They support U.S. plans for Iraq, and the Christian presence in the country is a major argument used by Iraqi authorities, including Islamic clerics, to have a secular government rather than an Islamic republic. "Right now, they can point to the Christians. They can say, 'Look, we're a pluralistic society,'" Shea says.
However, if Christians continue to flee, those who support a secular government will have no minorities to appeal to, according to Shea.

Already 50,000 Christians have fled the country. And they will all eventually leave, says Bejan, if persecution continues.
The Assyrian representatives hoped to write into the constitution religious freedom, women's rights, and equality for ethnic, and linguistic minorities, says Michael. Otherwise, he says, it will be the same as it has been for the last 1,400 years. "We have lived nearly 7,000 years in the north of Iraq. We still speak Aramaic, the language of Christ. We are the oldest Christian community on the planet," Michael says. All of that, he believes, is on the line now.

If an Islamic constitution is drafted, Shea says, ChaldoAssyrian Christians "will leave, assimilate, and that will be the end of their language. If they're forced to emigrate, the last concentration of Aramaic speakers, it's going to be gone. That will be the end of their culture."